Interstellar Mage

by Glynn Stewart

  “Can you bring Anders back to life?” she snapped.

  Silence.

  “No,” Costa admitted. “Had to be sure the only Mage aboard who could jump was me. There’s no going back. I can make you rich or you can all end up dead. It doesn’t seem like much of a choice to me.”

  Maria waved the exosuited security people back, taking several steps forward.

  “Is that why Turquoise betrayed us?” she asked. “Money?”

  “Oh, I made her a much better offer than mere money,” the young Mage said with a laugh. “You could get the Legacy off her back. The Legacy…we can make her a queen.”

  So much for Turquoise’s assurances she didn’t want to take over the Blue Star Syndicate. When it had been waved in front of her as a bribe, she must have leapt at it regardless.

  Maria shuffled forward.

  “Stop it, Mage Soprano,” Costa said quietly. “I can see everything you do. Every step you take brings Wu one step closer to a bullet in the—”

  His voice cut off in mid-sentence. Maria hesitated for a moment, and then a new voice came over the PA.

  “I have control,” Kelly LaMonte announced. “Internal networks back up in proper mode and I’ve locked Costa out. Maria—GO!”

  That was all she needed. Knowing that Costa wasn’t watching her, power flared around Maria and she charged the simulacrum chamber.

  Forty meters. With magic speeding her steps, turning each movement into an arcing leap as she turned gravity into her own personal toy, she crossed them in four seconds.

  The longest four seconds of her life. If Costa leapt to conclusions and pulled the trigger, Wu would be dead before she made it into the chamber. Her only hope was that the young Mage didn’t realize immediately that LaMonte had cut him off—or was holding off for her inevitable arrival.

  The door to the simulacrum chamber yielded cooperatively to her magic, flinging open as she threw herself into the zero-gravity room.

  Costa was on the platform next to the simulacrum, one leg hooked around it with an ease of long practice that he’d never shown before. Xi Wu floated next to him, tied to the platform with a length of utility cabling.

  The traitor had his gun trained on her head as she floated, and the young woman was clearly unconscious. Blood was visibly leaking down her forehead from a head wound. She was definitely alive, but from the look of her injuries, Maria wasn’t sure how long that would last.

  “Stop!” Costa bellowed, swinging to press the gun directly against Wu’s bloody temple. “Stop it, Soprano, or she dies!”

  “If you were going to shoot her, you already would have,” Maria pointed out. “Put the gun down, Costa. I’m sure you’d rather come in alive than in pieces.”

  “You’d like that,” he spat at her. “Another chance for the Navy to prove how much better they are than the rest of us, huh? You didn’t even realize we’d given you a fake destination. You have no idea where we’re actually going.”

  “I figured we had a fake location, actually,” Maria pointed out. “And wanting to know the real place is the only reason you’re still breathing. Put the gun down, Costa.”

  They hung like that for several moments and she realized the younger Mage’s hand was trembling.

  “Acconcio was the first person you’d actually shot, wasn’t he?” she said softly. “It was always hacks and tricks and ships blown apart on a screen before, wasn’t it? I doubt he was the first you killed, but he was the first whose blood you had to smell.”

  She could still smell his blood. She’d had no chance to wipe it off, and her shipsuit was covered in it. The thought did not make her any more inclined to let Costa live, but she needed what he knew. One interrogation session with the brat could break open Turquoise’s entire operation for the Navy and MISS.

  “Put the gun down,” she told him, drifting closer. “I’m not going to pretend I want to let you live, Costa, but if you put the gun down, I’ll make sure you do. Your life for Xi’s. You both get to live.”

  “Go fuck yourself!” he bellowed, and yanked the trigger—but he’d let Maria get too close. A wall of force slammed into the tip of the gun, cutting off the barrel and blocking the bullet before it reached Wu.

  The gun backfired, exploding in Costa’s hand and searing the flesh away from his runes.

  Before Maria could do or say anything more, he lashed out. A baseball-sized ball of flame flashed across the empty room toward her, but she batted it aside. Another fireball flickered at Wu from point-blank range, but she held the shield.

  Defending two people was hard, but for the first time in a while, Maria faced an opponent while fully, if artificially, refreshed. She wasn’t holding an air filtration spell or a barrier that needed to stop massed gunfire. The Exalt made up for having jumped. She was as close to full power as she’d ever entered a fight.

  And Shachar Costa, whoever he actually was, was not a Combat Mage.

  His fireballs were fast and dangerous, but they were brute force and unskilled. He had power to burn, far more than he’d ever shown her, but she had skill and training.

  She shielded herself and Wu, and then forced those shields in toward Costa, containing his fireballs again and again as she closed her magic around him, locking him inside a bubble of solidified air that defied his spells.

  Maria drifted over to him, doing her best to make her suppression of his desperate attempts to escape even more casual, and looked through the bubble.

  “The shield isn’t letting oxygen in,” she pointed out conversationally. “Those fireballs are burning it up fast.”

  He was already starting to visibly choke.

  “You might have burnt it up faster than you can replenish it…if you even have the energy left.”

  Costa coughed, trying to conjure an air filtration spell himself now. It fizzled. Now she could see that the runes in his right hand were mangled. He wasn’t jumping again until someone did a new inlay—and most of his complex magics like the filtration spell interfaced through the runes.

  “Fuck you,” he gasped out.

  “It seems poetic,” she replied. “This was how you killed Anders. How you planned to kill me. How does it feel, Costa? Knowing you’re going to die?”

  He was trying to hold his breath now, and Maria shook her head.

  “Unfortunately, I still need you,” she told his slumping body. The shield collapsed around his half-conscious form, bands of iron force slamming into place around his wrists and ankles.

  “Skavar, get in here,” she ordered loudly. “I need Mage-cuffs and a medkit, now!”

  42

  The sensors came up as Kelly crowed in victory—and then grabbed a microphone to talk to Soprano as the young engineer swept the area of the simulacrum chamber.

  David glanced at that, saw enough to hope that Soprano had it under control, and then focused on more immediate concerns.

  The lockdown was keeping the attackers out of his bridge, but there was an entire platoon of troops outside the heavy blast doors. Thankfully, only half a dozen of the forty or so boarders were in exosuits, but at least that many were sporting visible cybernetic augmentations. Two of those were manhandling a massive plasma cutter into place.

  The industrial machine was designed to cut the armor plates used for warships—the same material used for the blast shield. It wouldn’t necessarily get through the door quickly, but it was going to get through sooner rather than later.

  An even dozen exosuited security men and women were sweeping the living quarters and the rest of the command tower, while the rest of the armored suits were following Maria toward the simulacrum chamber and Engineering.

  There were both more boarders aboard than he’d thought possible and fewer than he’d feared. With the guards around the simulacrum chamber down, there were only two forces left: the forty or so boarders trying to break into his bridge, and a similarly sized force heading toward Engineering.

  “Do we have coms?” he asked Kelly.

 
“We have everything except external sensors,” she said crisply. “And we’ll have those…soon. Ish.”

  “Keep working,” he told her. “You’ve already saved half the day; no point in leaving the job unfinished, is there?!”

  He gave her a grin as she flashed him a pained smile, and then turned his attention to his coms.

  “James, come in,” he barked. “You should have sensors back up, but you have incoming. Report!”

  “I read you,” the engineer replied after a painfully long few seconds. “Linking up the sensors now. I shut down the control modules for the engines and life support when I lost contact with you. Rebooted from factory settings, but they’re been running on default state since.”

  He paused.

  “There’s definitely been some localized overrides on life support,” he said quietly. “I don’t know who we lost, but at least some people are dead in their beds. I could only make sure the main halls were safe.” He swallowed audibly.

  “We got sensors,” he continued after a moment. “That’s…not good, boss. I’ve got exactly one penetrator rifle down here. Ten exosuits and twenty support troops, plus what looks like someone’s chop-shop assault-cyborg squad? We can’t stop that.”

  “Skavar is at the simulacrum chamber,” David told him. “He’s coming up right behind them. All you have to do is keep them out until he gets there.”

  “Right. Hold off forty killers with a dozen engineers with guns.” He didn’t have visual, but David could hear his engineer’s head shaking. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Hunker down and wait for the Marines. It’s all either of us can do right now,” David admitted. “We have new friends outside, too, but I don’t have clear eyes yet.”

  Kellers paused.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of them actually being friends?” he asked.

  “I didn’t expect to be jumped from inside,” David replied. “Any actual friends are still an hour away.”

  “That’s closer than I’d expect.”

  David laughed.

  “What I can say, James? I’m paranoid and I never trust pirates!”

  The hissing sound from the blast door was the warning he’d been waiting for. The plasma cutter’s white-hot beam lit up the upper-right corner of the door as the team outside went to work.

  “Reyes,” David reached out to the security trooper. “The residential and work areas are clear. We have an assault team trying to burn through the door of the bridge, though, which I would quite like some help dealing with.”

  “Roger,” the man replied. “It’s going to take me time to reconsolidate the sweep teams, Captain. Five minutes, maybe more. Any faster and we’re just feeding men into the woodchipper.”

  “I know,” David acknowledged. “But…I had two one-shot armor rockets, Reyes. And they’re both gone. As soon as that door is open, we’re fucked—and there are hostile ships closing.”

  The security man sighed.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he promised.

  “LaMonte?” David asked.

  “I’ve got into the sensors and have forced a system reboot,” she told him. “Three minutes and counting.”

  “And the on-mount controls?”

  “We’re in touch with everybody,” Cohen reported. “None of them even saw boarders, though they were all smart enough to lock down the modules when communications went down.”

  He paused.

  “Campbell just reported in,” he told David. “She and Dr. Gupta are pulling people out of the living quarters and dragging them down to medical.” He shivered. “Not all of them made it. Not all of them are going to make it.”

  “Damn,” David said. At least Campbell was alive. He’d been worried.

  The plasma cutter had made it down about forty centimeters of the door. It would be a while before they were through…but it would be well before Reyes’s five minutes.

  “Everybody except LaMonte take cover,” he ordered. “And then cover LaMonte. Right now, her work is the most important thing happening on this ship.”

  Not least because while she’d got him back most of his control, the boarders still had more worms in his systems than he liked—and he had only the vaguest idea how they’d got there!

  He stood from his chair, carefully kneeling behind it as he winced against his injuries. The chair was armored enough to stand up to regular fire, though it wouldn’t stop penetrator rounds.

  “I make it about ninety seconds before they’re through,” Cohen noted, most of the bridge crew fixated on the slowly moving red-hot lines in the door. “Any chance of distracting them before that?”

  “Wait until it opens, then fill that hole with fire,” David ordered. “We don’t need to take them out, just keep them out!”

  Seconds ticked away and the entire chaotic situation narrowed down to one room, one gun, and one door that was about to be ripped open.

  Tunnel vision was dangerous, but it was also the only thing that would get him through the next few minutes. He watched the plasma cutter work its way along, and just as the man-sized hole finished, he opened fire.

  The first few rounds slammed into the heavy hull metal, setting the mostly detached chunk of door to vibrating…and then it fell outward and David’s bullets hammered into the plasma cutter itself.

  It was a heavy-duty industrial tool—but it wasn’t designed to be shot at. David wasn’t sure what he’d hit, but it was certainly effective. An explosion backlit the new opening in the bridge door, and he and his crew poured gunfire through the hole.

  The detonating plasma cutter delayed return fire by several seconds, but that was all. Clouds of high-velocity flechettes flickered into the bridge, ricocheting off the armored chairs and tearing into consoles and people alike.

  All that was visible through the door were fire and explosions, and David focused on putting bullets down the hallway, trying not to be distracted by the cries of pain around him.

  “Sir!” LaMonte suddenly snapped over the chaos. “We have a problem.”

  He emptied his carbine’s magazine into the hole and dropped to the floor to reload.

  “That’s a bit of an understatement!” he replied. “What now?”

  “We have four destroyers headed our way and they definitely aren’t Navy!”

  David somehow managed to stay focused even as the ground tried to fall out from beneath him. Red Falcon was heavily armed for a civilian ship, but she didn’t have the firepower to go toe-to-toe with even one destroyer, even an old export-built one without an amplifier or antimatter missiles.

  Four, plus whatever other ships were out there, were a death sentence if they couldn’t run—and they couldn’t run or fight with the bridge being actively invaded.

  He gave himself a moment to think by popping up over his chair and emptying a quarter of his magazine into an exosuited soldier trying to push his way through the door. The bullets ricocheted uselessly off the armor, and a blast of flechettes ripped up the back of his chair in response.

  David couldn’t see that side of his command chair, but he suspected the illusion that it wasn’t a chest-high barricade of hull armor was long gone now. Despite everything they could do, the first exosuited trooper was now in the bridge, the armor visibly damaged but unbroken by the fire pouring into it.

  And now the bullets weren’t even reaching the suit, as a field of magically solidified air locked around the opening, the Mage with the assault team finally acting to protect the members of the team they apparently valued.

  For several eternal seconds, David realized it was over. There was nothing he could do to stop the pirates taking the bridge. He’d failed…

  And then the shield flickered and disappeared as the incoming fire from behind the exosuit seemed to stutter. A single carefully targeted penetrator round flashed through the hole in the security door and punched through the helmet of the pirate who’d made it in.

  They slumped forward, and suddenly no gunfire was making it in�
�even as the gunfire outside rose to a sharp crescendo…and cut off.

  “Sir?” Reyes voice projected through the hole. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mange to take any prisoners—but the bridge access is secure.”

  David swallowed and carefully levered himself to his feet. He hadn’t even noticed that he’d been shot again. Several times, he now realized as the adrenaline wore off and he half-collapsed against his chair. Nothing serious, but he was bleeding.

  “Mr. Reyes,” he said as seriously as he could. “No prisoners? Really? I may have to dock some of the raise that comes with the promotion I now owe you!”

  The crew forced a laugh, and he looked around. His bridge was a mess. Gaspar Cohen was dead and he wasn’t the only one. The sheer intensity of the fight outside suggested he’d lost security troops, too. The butcher’s toll was already too high, but they weren’t done yet.

  David carefully lowered himself into his chair and turned to look at LaMonte.

  “We have external sensors?” he asked.

  “We do,” she said, her gaze focused on him so she didn’t have to look at dead friends.

  “Put it up,” he ordered. “Then take over tactical. We’ve made it this far. I’m not giving up now!”

  She nodded, swallowing as she took over control of the primary screens from her station.

  As the tactical display of this particular chunk of empty space lit up on the screen, David noted the time.

  It had been two hours since they’d jumped in.

  43

  The smell of blood and burnt wires lingered in the air, but David Rice was now fully in control of his bridge and his ship. Releasing the lockdown allowed Reyes and the other security people to haul his casualties to Dr. Gupta’s medbay, which meant that at least the dead weren’t lying around, distracting the living.

  “Engineering is secure,” Kellers reported. He sounded exhausted. “We lost six of Skavar’s people and as many of mine.”

  “Gupta is up and running,” David told him. “Get your wounded to the medbay; make sure the rest of your people are awake and on duty.”